up for grabs @ ISEA09
I will be at the ISEA09 participating in the Panel: Conspiracy Dwellings – Surveillance in Contemporary Art, convened by Pam Skelton, scheduled for August 27th at 2pm. The july 15 programme version is out and you can download it here iseaprogramme15july.pdf
My (revised) paper is titled “Up for grabs: webcams, aesthetic failure and intermedial Internet spectatorship.”
Extended abstract:
In his account of digital performance histories and practices, Steve Dixon places webcam operator Jennifer Ringley and her ‘virtual performance of real life’ at the centre of the webcam revolution. Jennycam and several webcam artworks streaming since the early 1990s, have paralleled online the increased use of cctv offline, and produced works that “engage with, subvert, and counter the prying surveillance of the camera lens to show ‘Reality Life’.”
This model of digital theatre is predicated on what are commonly understood as the two ontological traits of the webcam- its liveness and actuality, but now that the “aesthetics of camgirl” subcultures, with its reliance on “interactive autobiography on the web” have become mainstream to all bloggers and users of social network sites, as suggested by Theresa Senft, it is more than ever relevant to understand these aspects that appear to link millions of ‘ordinary’ autobiographers to those that use the networked computer for the staging of theatrical performance.
The interplay between computer webcams and representation of the self is critically analysed by Michele White, who challenges the association of webcam performance with unscripted immediacy, and proposes instead a webcam genre where women maintain control through several strategies. Interruption and image management rather than 24/7 availability appear thus as the defining features of women’s webcamming. Transmission failures and the operator’s decisions over when and how to be seen, conjoin to create a medium of resistance, in which the computer spectator is projected onto the screen, “too close to see.” This destabilises cinematic theories of the gaze and replaces it with a model of webcam spectatorship based on bodily morphing and synthesis.
Helen Jamieson extends this model of webcam spectatorship to the realm of cyberformance, “a live performance form with an audience that is complicit in the completion of the work in real time,” placing the genre more specifically in the participatory culture and shared knowledge space of the web 2.0. Working across online-offline spaces, Jamieson proposes to extend the notion of intermedial theatre developed by Chapple and Kattenbelt of ‘a space where the boundaries soften – and we are in-between and within a mixing of spaces, media and realities,’ to characterise the audience itself. The notion of an intermedial audience mentally and physically multi-tasking “upgrades the passive spectator to an integral position within cyberformance, without relinquishing the fundamental gap between performer and spectator.”
My contribution to this panel is as an afterthought on the relationship between webcamming and the subversion of surveillance, and a reflection on a line of work I’ve been pursuing that explores webcam communities as a platform for cyberformance curating. These hybrid online-offline practices create an intermedial time space, characterised by the aesthetics of webcam “grab” a term proposed by Theresa Senft as another way to account for the dynamics of web spectatorship, characterised not by voyeurism, but commodity fetishism, which women webcam operators resist, due to their “inevitable failure to please all consumers/viewers, all the time.” These aesthetics of webcam failure which ultimately resist clean cut surveillant views is outlined in this diagram
interactive autobiography on the web +politics of being seen / bodily morphing & synthesis + grab
= intermedial cyberformance audience